Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Following up yesterdays post we continue with the example of epic gems and trying to get the most out of them with the various ways they can be acquired. Yesterday was alchemy transmutes and today will be about honor bought gems and emblem of triumph gem exchanges. One note to keep in mind when reading this post though. As I mentioned yesterday in a few points, you need to consider more than just buy/sell prices. You have to take into account competition, availability, total stock, etc etc. All of those things should greatly influence your decisions so keep that in mind while doing your AH business.

When everything has the same "material cost" the opportunity cost (talk to X NPC) becomes exactly the same across the board. The only thing that changes the profit margins in this case are the resulting sales. Every American dollar is just as valuable as the next and many people have found ways to turn their small amount into massive fortunes. You can do the same with WoW. With 10k honor you can get any color of uncut epic gem. Since the price tag is equal for all of them, you should go for the most expensive thing you can get. I refer of course to cardinal rubies.

Why would I buy a yellow gem with honor when that same 10k honor gets me a red gem which sells for more? Again this is because the cost to get the gem is the same for every color, which is not the case with xmutes as they have different material costs. Buy the red gem, cut and sell, then use that gold to buy which ever colored gem you need. Doing anything else is an obvious waste.

Now lets translate this same scenario into exchanging emblems for epic gems. In case you forgot, the price is 20 emblems for red, blue, or yellow gems and only 10 emblems for orange, green, purple. Using the numbers I quoted yesterday, that equates into the following:

Using those numbers, buying 2x dreadstones to sell for 160g each turns into 320g in sales, while a singular cardinal sells for only 200g.

Based on that you can easily see (I hope at least) that spending 20 emblems on 2x purple or orange gems will get you 120g MORE than if you just bought a single red gem. Myself, I always buy purple gems with emblems because I always sell out of them and even if I had 500 emblems, I'd still get more from that than just buying any of the solid colors. Even if you need a strength gem or a stamina or a haste gem for your new "epic" gear you're still wasting potential profits. Stop that!

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Before I get started, I forgot to post a screen shot of my third gold cap so here it is. Combined totals from all toons plus my guild bank.

Screenshot.

Inc Wall O' Text!(tl;dr: too bad, read it anyway.)

Part one of three on how to save money by spending your gold and other currency (including materials) wisely. One of the main things that helps in the long run for making gold is to cut as many corners as you can. Save that 3g here and there and all around getting more bang for your buck. So today I'll give you a few examples everybody can relate to for future reference. This entire post is based on assumed numbers (taken from my AH) and different servers are different, so if you can get 400g or something silly for one gem and I list it for 160 you can just ignore me. First is epic gem xmutes.

For arguments sake, we'll pretend my server's AH average price is the same as yours:

Xmute mastery doesn't matter as it effects the outcome on each gem equally. With those assumed prices in mind, that means that an epic gem xmute will cost you:

Red - 75Blue - 30Orange - 30Yellow - 30Purple - 25Green - 15

This is where being cost effective comes into play. If you're cutting and selling epic gems, which should you transmute? Almost everybody will either xmute the gem they "need" for a new piece of gear with a socket, or will just get a red gem made because it's "the best" or it "sells for the most." If you do either of those, you're doing it wrong. Lets take the average sale price of each gem being cut and see which makes the most profit shall we?

One other thing to keep in mind is the speed of sales and competition. Green gems sell very slowly and thus will have a lot of competition due to people having a constant unsold inventory. Solid color gems will sell almost instantly, but common cuts like bold or runed will have good competition due to popularity. Blue stamina gems don't follow suit exactly in that every tank that gets an upgrade will need at least two of these gems, usually 3. So because of that if only 3 tanks get an upgrade in ToC or ICC that's 9 gems that were just bought, usually yours included. Purple and orange will sell over the course of a day or two, but will definitely be sold before lost deposits become a problem.

Looking at those figures, you can see that if you make the "most expensive gem" you're making the same amount of profit as you would making and selling the LOWEST price gem. Perhaps you're playing a tank and need some new stamina gems. You can xmute and cut a blue epic, but then you're still screwing yourself out of a potential 10g in sales. Sure 10g might not be a lot, but because you only see the 10g loss here and there and always forget that the 10th time you do that it has become 100g and isn't just 10 anymore. To the serious AH player, 10g on top of every gem cut they do adds up to a ton of gold by the end of the week. However if you're already well stocked on yellow epics, blue xmutes are close enough to be worth it so you can keep your market diverse.

Based off of this very simple example is why I always xmute epic yellow gems as opposed to reds because the profit margins are better. And to boot, brilliant ambers sell just as fast as a bold cardinal, sometimes even faster to to less competition with selling "the most expensive" gem. Don't get your head stuck in the big numbers > quality numbers mentality. A 500g sale is never 500g profit!

Monday, March 29, 2010

It's that time again, resets, crashes, bugs, and reports. Today is the day where I provide you with some nice reading material while angrily awaiting blizz to get servers back up. Fun story, I got my super expensive banker up to lvl 10. I did this because blizz doesn't store character data unless you at least reach that level. I did this just in case I lose my account (ie hacked) and lose something like 30k gold worth of worthless stuff.

All that being said, here's the weekly numbers and bottom lines.

Income per bankerEpic gems, rare orange gems, vendor pets: 64,000

Rare gems, meta gems, LW, misc: 17,000

Smithing and enchanting: 46,000

Glyphs: 13,000

Total weekly sales: 140,000Total gold: 647,000

That makes gold cap number three!

Random thought, but here are a few statistics I've come up with about my AH playing I found interesting.

Now if only I could track how many total auctions I create, sell, and buy each week. Now THAT is a number I'd like to see.

Detailed Recap--------------Wow rare gems sure have been in the sewers this week, barely any sales coming in from that market. This is likely due to the fact that epic gems are so wide spread people are willing to pay the extra 100g for that 4 spellpower that will totally make the difference between 2k dps and their goal of 12.5k dps. This same thing happened towards the end of TBC so I expect this trend to continue. If that's the case, I'll be paying less and less attention to this market as soon its profits may be too small for the effort.

I started this week off with 40 of each of the new enggy pets and have sold every last one of them, I even had to craft another 10 of each to stay stocked up. Frozen orbs seem to have leveled off at an average of 20-25g each which is also the normal-ish price for eternal fires/life and 1/6 the price of crusader orbs. I'm a little surprised that it leveled out so quickly. Regardless, this means I'll have to raise my threshold for all items that need frozen orbs to craft and can be a lot more loose with things that use eternals. If orb prices are low, I'll buy them to craft and sell the eternals as is. This has been working well with eternal fires as I've been regularly flipping them for a nice 15-25g profit each. I highly recommend trying this out as it's very simple to compare the price of fires and orbs.

Epic gems have been hard to keep in stock once again, especially purples. The prices are still higher than pre patch but you can see the signs that they're going down as the less popular ones are dropping quick while the more common ones are down by a few gold pieces. Hopefully I can move my whole stock while prices are still up top. Only 4 more stacks of epics left to sell.

For some reason belt buckles are selling at almost triple the normal rate, I've had to craft 5 stacks so far when normally I only need 2 stacks at most for an entire week! The same goes for weapon chains which 20 of them will last me some time but I've been selling a lot more this week. Perhaps people realize they're great for pvp with all the random BG's getting done. Anybody having a similar experience?

Other than that, everything else has been the same for the most part. Enchanting is still amazing when stocked with crystals (even started selling blade ward scrolls), LW is mostly out of supply, vendor pets still make me a killing. Also tailoring has still been selling off a ton of epic threads each day ever since the patch came so if you're able to, look into it and make a bit of extra coin.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

EDIT: I just sold the titanium razorplate that I had crafted for 3,500g less than 24 hours after crafting (perhaps lucky as hell?). After material cost and AH cut (175g which made me cry a little) it got me a hefty 1125g profit! That's one success, now to finish the leveling kit.

I've always said that you need to take many chances and many high risks in the AH game to get far. So I'm taking a few more this week to give you a more current example of how they can turn out. Though mostly I'm doing them for the entertainment value, something new, something fresh, and a semi educational experience. I am putting together a leveling kit for one and the other is crafting and selling epic i245 gear since I got some patterns from a ToC 25 pug. The pug actually went well amazingly enough. We pulled within 15 minutes of filling up, one short everything easily, and I even got my DK a bunch of upgrades including death's choice!

So I turned a bunch of frost orbs into crusaders as that was most cost effective, had titansteel smelted for me, and made the epic gear from all of that and posted it for a potential 1500g profit. Here's to hoping! All of that cost me about 2k to gather and not sell so that's a rather huge investment into a single sale, not the sort of thing your average AH player can afford to take a loss on, but I'm putting my money where my keyboard is so to speak. Normally a few thousand gold investment is reserved for breaking into a whole new market and not just a single item like I'm doing, but I'm very curious to how quickly it sells or if it does at all.

As to the leveling kit, I've spent about 2k or so thus far and expect the total cost once it's complete to be around 3.5-4k or there about. I plan to sell it for 5k all at once since it is a huge inventory I'll have to move and will be taking up a ton of space in the mean time, but doesn't take a huge amount of extra effort. Regardless, even if I wasn't rich, if I saw one of these being sold when I was going to level that profession, I'd totally buy it. Hell I'd likely spend 2k more than material cost just to avoid the hassle of it all. All I need now is a good sales pitch for it to spam in trade, so if any of you have a clever idea by all means let me know!

Other chances I have taken recently were buying up all the materials on AH for the newly BoE engineering pets before patch day so people wouldn't want to be bothered with a heart of fire for 50g and figuring out wtf fused wiring is. I made a good 300g or so from reselling the heart of fires and engineering made materials for up to 50g a piece with the material cost I paid for them to begin with was around 5g. I'm sure that it was also rather influential in many sales for these cheap pets getting sold for hundreds of gold.

So over the course of this week I'll be updating when something happens with the crafted epics and leveling kit, but in the mean time I still need a bunch more old world mats and a good pitch to sell it with.

Friday, March 26, 2010

This post is part two of my series showing what you can do with your money. This post will not focus on the up and coming auctioneer, but on one that has already found a niche or a market that is doing well for them. So for the sake of argument, today we will pretend that the following is true: you do not have to farm anymore, you have at least one market that you have a solid grasp on, you want to make more gold because...MOAR! Ok now that's out of the way, here's a few things you can do with 5k gold to turn it into more.

The first thing I would recommend is creating a massive stockpile of your current market. If it's something like enchanting, jc, or glyphs, you can easily drop 5k on a month or two worth of mats. This will give you a nice bit of personal freedom since you won't have to scan daily for good deals.

Perhaps you've taken my advice already and have a sizable stockpile of materials and want to be a bit more adventurous. Why not take that money and venture into a whole different market? It's risky, dangerous, and fun! It almost feels like you're the first person doing it ever in the history of WoW. Not true of course but doesn't change how exciting it can be, especially when it turns out to be a big success. Every market can be gotten into slowly no matter how big it might be. The only thing to keep in mind is inscription won't get you a big pay back unless you've already done a lot of the daily research glyphs. But for these purposes we'll assume that you've done it enough (both major and minor) to at least compete.

With 5k gold you can break into enchanting. Buy yourself about 800 dust, 100 greater cosmics, 3 stacks of armor/weapon vellums, 20 eternal water, 60 eternal earth, 60 shards, 20 titanium bars, and 3 stacks of abyss crystals. That should cover all the northrend enchants for a good amount of time and totals a hair under 5k spent. After that go to the AH and search for "scroll of enchant" and "scroll of enchant weapon" for the full list of all enchanting scrolls being sold. That will let you know the price range of each scroll, which appear directly in the "consumable - scroll" category. Check on them every day for a week for a good idea of what to make first. Also be sure to read my How To Enchanting post in the mean time for how I work this market. If you've read my business reports, you'll see that enchanting is a large portion of my income so you can make this investment back rather fast.

Perhaps you want to try glyphs. First you'll need a whole new banker with 4x scribe bags. Your crafter will need at least two of them to reduce the time from crafting to mailing. If you're just starting I'd recommend only making ones that use ink of the sea or etheral ink. These are the most common sales and there aren't a few thousand to make. Start with small stack sizes of 3 of each and list them all. Put your max price in the 20-30g range so you can start with some decent profit on the few you're making, but if you suspect a few glyph campers drop it down to 10g right away and become the goblin. You can easily drop 5k on herbs at 13g/stack and hundreds of parchment, it's normal for me to refill my stock of inky and spend 5k a month for more inks all at once.

I'll be stopping here for today since it is rather wall o text already. I'll let this sink in so you can come up with some of your own thoughts on how to turn 5k into 10 or even 20. Till next time have fun and good luck.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Even though I managed to get my suspension lifted in about two hours, I missed the most important sales period of patch day...the first two hours. Regardless I still managed to make over 10k in that single day! This warrants its own in depth post because I expect the same things to continue to sell well for the week if not longer. So I'll make this post like my business reports but by the markets for what has been selling like mad.

Pets:I sold 10 of each of the pet bombling and lil' smokey pets in almost no time for 200g each, which cost me a small 30g to make. Along with those, ALL vendor bought pets have been selling out. That includes the ones sold by Breanni in Dal and Dealer Rashaad in the netherstorm. This I wasn't expecting but I sure won't complain.

Epic gems:I did a good thing stocking up on these as I made over 6k in sales from these in a single day. The price raw went from 130g on AH to 170g! And guess what types sold the best? PvP gems.. go figure. Most notable are sp/resil ametrine, 20 resil ambers, and agil/resil ametrines They sold so fast that I am now listing two at a time instead of one since that won't effect my profits from lost deposits.

Rare gems:Not many sold since people -must- have all epic gems in their new pvp gear to show off while they're busy NOT doing PvP.

Glyphs:Another thing I guessed right was any spec related to any changes on skills and/or glyphs sold out. One thing I made a mistake on was not noticing the changes to the feral tree (namely mangle) so I missed out on a few hundred gold from that. But I still crafted a set of 10 glyphs relating to the spec and sold them all as well. I listed a total of 1850 glyphs and sold over 2k worth of them, that's double my average daily sales.

Every standard mutilate/combat glyph has been selling out along with anything that even LOOKS like subtlety may use. Also mage glyphs have been selling much more now that fire got a bunch of buffs (and is far more fun than arcane imo) so they will likely stay like that for a bit. Surprisingly enough, every single shaman spec glyph has sold a ton of as well along with hunters. Scary since those two classes seem to just never want glyphs period.

Tailoring:I'm not sure on the reasoning behind this, but I just could not keep epic spellthreads on the AH for the life of me! I have sold 12 of each for 250g each and up, I'm guessing that this is because of frozen orbs being worth quite a bit now that the competition couldn't afford to craft them or used the orbs for other things.

Frozen Orbs:This now counts as its own market for the time being. The prices were going up and down from 30g to 50g, the same with eternal fires. I sold 8 fires for 55g and 6 orbs for the same while using the rest for more threads and filling up my stock of eternal life/fire. I expect these to continue to sell very well.

Specialty cloth:I have sold over a stack of each type for 60g, much better than I was expecting profit wise. Frostweave bags, while constantly selling, won't give nearly the same profit as the cloth so I'll be focusing on making them with my imbued cloth from now on. Glacial bags I'm still not wanting to risk making because of the other 2 sources of bigger bags (FoS heroic and ony 10/25)

Titansteel:Is now only 10g above material cost if you base fires at 25g and shadows at 15g (which are double that on the AH) so I'm glad I didn't bother to max out mining on my lvl 68. So for the time being, unless your server is vastly different from mine, don't bother making this for a while. The prices will likely go up a while later once the initial flooding goes away possible up to the levels that specialty cloth is at currently. If it winds up being a steady 20ish gold profit per bar I might end up maxing my mining since it'll be worth the time then.

Enchanting/smithing:Buckles are, well, buckles...they sell awesome no matter what day it is. Enchanting though has sold many of the common armor enchants such as greater assault boots, ice walker, super stats, and powerful stats. I must have sold a few dozen total and emptied my abyss crystal stock on just powerful stats making over 100g profit per sale. If you have an enchanter at least make this scroll and take advantage.

Ok I think that pretty much covers it. Again, expect these sales to continue at this rate for a bit longer making more profit than usual for the rest of the week, possibly longer. So to all the bankers out there get to work, you know what sells and where to focus.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

So it's time for servers to come up and I'm a giddy little banker excited to make a profit off of orbs and other goodies and try out the new subtlety rogue spec (like uber excited) and I find this waiting in my email:

This suspension happened because one or more characters on the account were identified exchanging, or contributing to the exchange of, in-game property (items or gold) for "real-world" currency. This exchange process negatively impacts the World of Warcraft game environment by detracting from the value of the in-game economy.

...so on and so on. Apparently the campers got a bit pissy and decided to report me for money trading and since I do rake in a large sum of money (probably 10x more than the average mining bot) it would be very easy for blizz to say "sure we'll suspend them so they can't undercut you anymore you poor poor darling, we're all halpfool frendly ppl here! How dare they sell gems while you are trying to sell them as well, don't worry the boogy man won't hurt your imaginary pixels anymore." I highly doubt that just now blizz decided my account needs to be flagged for "investigation" when I've been pulling in this much gold for a while now as you can tell from my many previous posts.

Why would somebody get this upset at me over this? Simple, you've all heard the expression before, you've all joked about the morons that base their IRL self worth on it: the almighty E-peen. Their thinking is that person is "hurting" me and so they therefore MUST be doing something unfair to cheat since I'm doing the same thing as them! This means that they're not one of the "nice frendly ppls" so whatever actions I take against them are justified. How can this be? I mean it isn't real, I'm not taking anything from them nor am I harassing them in any way.

Even though they've harassed me in trade, mail, and whispers, many times I refuse to argue with them (or even respond) and attempt to enlighten them how they are incorrect. If I choose to argue with them, they will only lower me to their level of ignorance and beat me due to far greater experience in that area. By the way if you're wondering what this language translates into, suffice to say it's Chinese and is a vulgar comment about my mother, a sexual act, and a questioning of my intellect. Feel free to google it if you want the slang meaning translated a bit further.

Obviously to be in the position I am, I'm not the type of person who helps out the poor lost soul that just needs a few thousand to get their 6th epic mount. Or help the sad unlucky fellow who just has to have a motorcycle. However these are somehow considered to be "wrong" or "uncool" actions even though it's only wrong when it wrongs them. Is there a solution to the social mongoloids that roam this planet with the intent of leeching off of the productive members of society and plaguing our world? As a matter of fact, there is!

Lucky for me I managed to get my account activated again after two hours (half of which were spent on hold)so I was able to capitalize on the last few hours of the BUYBUYBUY frenzy that is patch day. I'll post more about it tomorrow, but for the mean time I'm still far too annoyed at the "shoot first ask questions later" bit. Proper post coming tomorrow, promise... /angryface

Monday, March 22, 2010

It's that time again, resets, crashes, bugs, and reports. Today is the day where I provide you with some nice reading material while angrily awaiting Blizz to get servers back up. This week like the many before it has had its ups and downs and has been a lot of fun. I'm also starting to put together a profession leveling kit! I'll give out the finer details on it once it either sells (success) or gets auctioned off in pieces (failed). Though I will say this about it: holy shit does it take up a lot of space! A lot meaning 162 inventory spots which is 5x 32 spot profession bags. As for now though, numbers and bottom lines come first.

Income per bankerEpic gems, rare orange gems, vendor pets: 26,000

Rare gems, meta gems, LW, misc: 16,000

Smithing and enchanting: 45,000

Glyphs: 8,000

Total weekly sales: 95,000Total gold: 550,000

At the rate of 30-60k profit each week that translates into a new toon gold capped about every month. At this rate I expect to be retiring sometime in late June. I am most excited to hit the million marker which is far more worthy of an achievement than facerolling every "heroic" in northrend.

Detailed Recap--------------Once again prices on epic gems have been slowly decreasing, but this time it's only the prices for raw gems and not pre-cut ones. So while the income might not be as large, the profit is far better this way. Just last night I managed to pick up 3 stacks of epic gems for a mere 100g each or 2k a stack. With the average gem selling for 150g+ that's very nice compared to buy for 130 sell for 140. The campers have also seemed to find other things to occupy their time with aside from waiting for me to log on and off. While this indeed does increase my profits, it does lessen the amount of laughs I get while doing my business. Sad banker is sad.

Enchanting mats have been restocked finally even though I had to change my thresholds around a lot. Twink enchants seem to only sell during the weekend as I sold several 30sp and 22int enchants on sat/sun and only a single one during the week, curious as to why that is but still a good bit of info to point out. Mongoose however sells fairly often since it is (in my opinion) the best tanking enchant you can get. Good up-time makes it on average better than 26 agility and adds threat, dodge and armor, what more could a tank want? Also nobody wants to go through the process of getting keyed or using the "fall through the floor" glitch to get into a 70 raid in the middle of no where for the recipe. Me however, I know it's worth it so I took the time investment and am making a killing off of it.

Rare gems have been on a roller coaster, so when I see some gems cut for cheap I'll buy them up and resell later on. I bought a dozen 32ap gems for 25g and a few days later sold them off for 60-85 each. This is where it's important to be patient and remember that EVERYTHING has a price. So I don't worry when I buy ten of the same gem cut because I know that it will sell. That's not much different than just buying the gem raw because I know that I'll be needing to make another of that specific cut in the near future.

Tailoring has finally gotten stocked up so I have enough mats to craft another 80 nether bags along with a bunch of spider silk to last me another week or two. Which is good because having to always worry about your buying price and scavenging for materials is never fun. If it weren't for the fact that I only have 1-2 competitors it wouldn't be worth it. If that was not the case I honestly wouldn't bother.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

If you think you can't start working the auction house because you don't have a huge amount of start up cash then this post (and the ones to come) are just for you. This is part of a series giving a few specific pointers for people that are either just starting out or are already in the AH game but don't want to break into an entirely new market. So if you have a bit of spare change in your pockets then read on and use it to get a bit more!

I may have thousands of gold, but that doesn't mean I have forgotten what it can be like to start up or how it may seem impossible to do without several thousand to start with. I'm just going to assume that you have at least 1k gold to play around with just as a good number. Naturally it takes money to make money so if you don't have that much you will need to farm and grind for a bit to get some seed money to grow into much more.

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....

.....

Done farming yet? Ok good!

First lets see what kind of goodies 1k of loose gold can do for you (using my server's standard AH prices).

7 dread stones or ametrines

-Get those cut leaving a 20g tip if you intend to use the same person for future business. Post them up for 180g each after doing your homework on which sell the best with the lowest competition. After AH cut and tip you just made roughly 300g profit. Not bad for only 1k start up.

Ok maybe gems are in the gutter for your server (impossible but we'll go with it). Find the local black smith, with 1k you can buy:

Turn that into 40 belt buckles to sell over the course of 4-8 days at most. Voila! You just turned your 1,000g into 2,000g.

Maybe you find there's too much competition in those areas so you want to try enchanting. Since you're just starting out here we'll pretend that you have zero rep with any old world factions and CBA to go out get more rep. In that case go and buy yourself...

Using low end prices from my sales, all of that turns your 1k investment into about 1600g.

As you can see, although you need money to make more, you definitely don't need to be gold capped to get gold capped. Take this lesson to heart and realize that you can indeed break into any market with only a small bit of start up funding.

Friday, March 19, 2010

I've mentioned denial of service before off and on, but today I'll go a bit more in depth with it. This only works with certain things, so you can't expect it to happen with every profession or item. The main thing I want to get across is the mentality of the seller (you) and the buyer (the moron).

Now you can do that enchant, you happen to be in a different city or even the same one. The question is though, how many others can do it? Answer: not that many. You can either go to them and do the enchant or sit on your hands waiting for them to finally make it to you without tripping over their shoelaces. Or you can just continue with what you were doing to begin with.

The customer has a want which they have confused with a need. So they must have this enchant done NOW or else their super cool BoA staff is now somehow worth less than the one I bought. Naturally this isn't the case, but having an unenchanted BoA item makes them seem not cool, and your typical moron can't afford to be uncool to their peers. They also can't afford to wait for anybody to finish what they're doing or wait and keep posting later on in the day/night.

The seller knows that only a few people can do said enchant, and most have either stopped playing or won't be around when the enchant is needed except for them. That gives them a pseudo-monopoly on it meaning they can set the price for the most part. The seller then gets on their banker and makes sure that they have a scroll of +30sp on auction at lowest price then continues on their way.

The buyer gets curious and looks for a scroll on AH. They add the sellers to their friends list to perhaps ask them to be "cool, helpful friendly" and go from where ever they are to them for an enchant. Lo and behold, they are not online...QQ. They then are overcome by the "need" for that enchant and buy the scroll for 550g. They are now sitting with 100g in mats which are now "worthless" so they put them on auction for 50% of the current value.

The seller, comfortable in the knowledge that they're likely to have a sale soon, eventually finishes their business and gets on their banker. Behold! A scroll of overpriced awesomeness has sold! They then do a scan for the materials and find a pair of golden pearls on sale for 25g which they eagerly purchase with a smile. Enter the enchanter who makes another 30sp scroll for the low low price of 80g to list for a whopping 550g.

Lather, rinse, and repeat.

AH giggle of the day!I was on my ench/bs banker collecting my nightly mail when I noticed that a bunch of enchanting rods had sold to the same person (including a copper rod for 18g). Then as I'm posting scrolls I find that same person listing 7 of the same scroll of major stamina to shield for material price. I buy them and list at my fall back of 150g as there were no others besides them. Morning comes and 3 of them had sold. Do I need to go on?

Lesson learned: When you have little or no competition, please don't list things for 20% of market price. Pointless undercutting is pointless.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

I decided to level up an old shammy alt of mine to get the engineering pet plans from gnomer which are becoming BoE in the patch. At first I was just planning to scalp the mats for a premium once they were all bought up. But in doing so I forgot an important lesson in the AH game: never limit your options! So I got the plans and decided to look into anything else I might be able to make some profit on with engineering. Sure you can make epic ammo, but with a 1500 entry fee along with a long time farming rep that is.

With stacks selling for 5g I'm not exactly considering that good money, at least not for the immense time it will take to make back the price of a primordial saronite. With that in mind I decided to look for some other things I could make along the liens of pets and I came across two, mechanical squirrels and toads. The plans for the squirrel can be bought for a measly 10g or less, but the toad is rather pricey. I got lucky and got the toad plans for 500g and have sold two so far long with a dozen squirrels. Believe me when I say the materials to make them are filthy cheap especially when compared to the price they sell for.

This is because 99% of all engineering plans need items made by engineers so to say "free with your mats" doesn't really work that well for most. Even looking to see that a squirrel takes a few copper bars and such to make one for 3g, people just CBA and want their toys NAO!!1!1 So I am more than happy to oblige a customer...that can pay the price of course.

Along with these two pets there are a few other things you can make for some fast money. Mithril casings are a common one since they're needed fro a quest in un'goro crater. And believe it or not, blasting powder and a few mid level explosives sell also to twinks. Long story short, don't limit yourself and always be willing to try something different and seemingly crazy...it just might pay off.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Short but good suggestion for everyone today. If you're mildly observant and a bit aggressive you've likely thought of this already, but just in case I wanted to make a post on the subject today.

With the random material shortages on my server I first had to go to trade chat for raw materials. However I cannot afford to stand in Org all day long before my sanity begins to slip even if I'm busy working and occasionally hitting a WTB macro. So what am I to do when I still need massive amounts of saronite or herbs? Hire a farmer.

Like any good business you need good employees to be successful. When I go to the AH to buy stuff I look at who is selling what. Any time I see somebody with a lot of something for sale I'll buy it all and send them an in game mail asking if they have more or if they want to cod their stuff to me. It has gotten me a ton of raw materials in the past and still does. So if you're in need of bulk supply give this a try.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Important note up front here. In case you don't read my business reports, I would suggest that you do. It is far more than me just saying "hey look at me I'm rich bitch!" You will get a good idea of how markets are changing and can relate that to your server. Also under the detailed recap at the bottom you will always find a few pieces of very useful information. Usually just an "oh by the way" form that wouldn't qualify an entire post, but important none the less.

500k mark has officially been broken! Half way to my goal which makes me a happy banker. More fun situations this week as usual, but of course bottom lines come first.

Detailed Recap--------------Epic gems have been slowly decreasing over time and took a huge dive towards the end of the week. Reds are still steady at 200g+ sales while all the others have dropped by 50g leaving me with a tiny profit margin on some. All of this is of course is due to my dealings with the campers. Regardless, it's still about normal over all profits for this market as I'm able to move a lot more gems than anybody else. That's partly because of my massive stockpiling and my close attention to my purchase prices. My threshold for mix colored gems is now 130 with a min sale of 140, but that doesn't mean that I never get a gem for 100g or sell that gem for 250g. For every gem I make 5g profit on I sell two for 100g profit.

Leather working has made a slight come back in supply and I am back to selling armor kits as my primary focus for 50g a piece. Sure I can still sell profession bags for 80g but the profit margins are better with the armor kits and sell just as often which makes them a better choice to craft. Oddly enough though, artic furs and the related products are within 10% of the price of leather.

Glyphs have been a solid 1k per day with a few people buying out my cheaper ones. I don't mind since I'm making a profit still and they're putting in much more effort picking up and relisting a few hundred glyphs than I am with my normal business of craft and post (without the extra step they take). The idea here is the standard time/profit. So long as I'm making good profit without extra time put in that is all that matters and is very important to keep in mind with the glyph trade.

I managed to hit a huge night with enchanting selling 4 goose scrolls for 550g a piece along with a few old world ones as well. I said it last week and I'll say it again, denial of service works like a charm. Every time when somebody wants mighty intellect to weapon or agility to 2h. I just make sure that I have one on auction and wait. The only problem is with spellpower due to the rarity of finding golden pearls. Sometimes they sell for 150g which people will pay, but that makes it a bit iffy considering you can still buy them for 50 another day just like the competition. You never want to get stuck with a loss because you were too anxious for a profit.

I have actually been making a good amount on JC leveling gear and cut bloodstones. I mentioned this last week, but it has contributed to over 600g profit to my bank since then so it's worth another small mention.

As a final note, I can't help but be curious, how are raw materials looking on your server? Are you just as supplied as ever? Things running out? Prices going way up or down? I understand my situation because almost nobody farms seriously, only what they need "for free" and dailys for income. But I can't believe every server is in such a huge swing of supply and lack of it.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Shortish post today about some more hidden goodies I've come across with jewel crafting. If you've done the saronite shuffle before I'm sure most of you have just turned the common gems into enchanting mats or just sold them as is. The same with x-muting saronite to titanium bars...stop it! JC leveling rings do sell albeit slowly, but the higher level ones are selling rather quickly for me along with some common cut gems believe it or not.

What I've been making lately are:-Runed mana band-Bloodsun necklace-Emerald chocker-Sky sapphire amulet-Cut bloodstones of all kinds-Ring of earthen might

The necks let you have a decent piece there while saving your emblems for tier and not replacing another green spot, and the tank ring is one of very few options for a fresh 80.

The bloodstones you can buy for as cheap as 1g per and I sell them cut for up to 10g each and perfect cuts for 15 a piece. Rather nice profit margins isn't it? The best part is since almost everybody either sells them raw or turns them into DE fodder there's no competition and you can just post them for 48 hours and ignore it.

The same goes for the rare quality jewelery since when you first hit 80 they're decent pieces, especially since they have gem sockets and can be put on at 78. Titanium bars being priced what they are doesn't make a huge amount of profit with the transmute even when specced so if you have a ton of saronite like me put it to good use!

Especially useful when buying over 9000 stacks of saronite ore you prospect and find blue/green rare gems which sell slow for small profit you can turn them into gear and make serious money from it. This little business also takes zero extra effort and allows you to post and collect only once every two days, can't beat that.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Bidding is a big part of the auction house, but I have not really read anybody touch on it before. There's a lot of auctions you'll find that are not just buy out only and some with a very low bid cost. When you make a bid on an item, the only thing that you have to lose is the time it took to make the bid. Some times you can get materials that are way below market price just with bids, but it's a good idea to know when and what to bid on.

First here's the general mentality of having a low low bid price. Lets say I want to auction [epic item] and it's worth 5,000g. I know that it might sell for that price, but I want my money now and I don't want to deal with deposits and checking for under cuts, and so forth. So I'll put it up for a very low bid thinking that since the price is so low I'll get at least that much hopefully attracting attention and have more bid on it. However this doesn't work for low price items like gems or flasks because people want these things NOW! But you can still find a cut gem with a bid price of less than the materials every day.

Things that you want to try to win a low bid for are things that typically take a day or so to sell or have a specialty market. Things like gems, rare recipes, motorcycles if it's below mat cost, things of this nature. Some that you'll waste your time on are herbs, belt buckles, or flasks because these types of items sell very fast and in large amounts.

You also need to keep in mind that people camp their bids just as much as they camp their auctions and you know how much that is. Because of that making a bid on any auction that has 48 hours left is almost a promise to get you out bid on defeating the whole purpose of bidding in the first place. Even some things will be bid camped at 24 hours remaining.

Here's the thought process or "mental check list" I go through when I see a low bid for something I want with a decent price. This is all assuming the bid is cheap but the buy out is far too high to pay.

I will place a bid if it:-Has 30 minutes remaining (listed as short)-Doesn't sell frequently or is specialized (old world mats or expensive wotlk mats)-Is something I am nearly out of-Is below material cost-Is being bid camped. I'll do this until it's at my threshold and bid a little bit more based on price solely to mess with the camper.-Is an item from outland or high level old world item (arcane dust or illusion dust)-Has potential for high resale, such as epic ToC trade recipes

I will NOT bid if it:-Has over 12 hours left (listed as long)-Sells very often regardless of price-Is priced right at my buying threshold-Is expensive and being camped-Is rarely seen, like a golden pearl (this means many are watching and waiting to bid at the last moment)

Granted it takes almost no time or effort to bid, but when bidding on 50 things at once, which is common to do, You can get your mail box very cluttered with failed bidding and the time it took to make all of those bids has been lost. Bidding can save you a bunch of gold if you do it right, but if you don't pay attention you'll end up increasing the bid price for no reason which is silly.And you don't want to waste your time after all, do you? As usual, time is money friend!

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Yet another week has come and gone, time sure does fly. Prices have been up and down every day so it's been hard to keep a stock of almost anything and even more difficult to predict when is a good day to sell for more than my bottom line threshold. There has also been almost zero leather to be found so that market is essentially done as far as I'm concerned. Here's the numbers.

Income per banker:

Smithing and enchanting - 46,000

Rare gems and misc. - 17,000

Glyphs - 9,000

Epic gems and vendor pets - 61,000

Tailoring - 6,000 (estimated)

Total weekly income: 139,000Current gold total: 470,000

Detailed Recap:---------------

Enchanting, smithing, and tailoring have been rolling along quite nicely as per usual so nothing special to note on those professions really. I began to start selling a few more armor enchants though, specifically tuskarr's vitality, intellect to shield, crusher, and greater assault to boots.

Glyphs have been selling loads as usual but due to campers my max price has been capped at 8g per glyph for most of this week and I only raised it to 10g two days ago. Since I crashed the glyph prices, with many up for 40g a piece, I haven't seen any of the campers bothering to log on their glyph bankers. So now that I am once again the dominant force in the inscription racket I MIGHT raise the prices up to 20g by the end of next week.

Can't say for sure because it is very nice to not have to worry about being spam undercut. For a couple days they started trying to buy out all of my 3g glyphs to relist for more so I just started crafting new glyphs every day instead of every other day to take care of that. They stopped trying to buy me out immediately after. I've also started to craft 10 of every DK glyph instead of 5 since I've been constantly selling out of them and am having to craft at least another 7 of each every day so I recommend you try to do the same if you have the ink stock for it.

With tailoring I've sold 30 epic spell threads for anywhere from 150g to 235g along with countless nether/frost bags. I still do all my buying from that toon so the 6k figure is a best guess assuming on average 180g per spellthread and a few hundred total from bags and rare threads.

Epic gems! The prices have started to fall daily thanks to my price battle with a 24 hour camper so even though you see a large number of income, I'll be honest and tell you that it's only about 15k profit at the most. My goal hasn't been to make money, but rather to ensure that they are not. Even if that means me taking a large loss some days. That's just the kind of ass I can be with campers. Hopefully they'll realize that camping is a waste of time and do something more productive with their life rather than waiting for me to log on and off. It happens every time I change toons from my gem banker, under 10 minutes and they log on to check their auctions. I only post below my threshold if they have that specific gem on auction otherwise I still stand by it.

Rare gems have had the same issue that I've started buying the gems my competition has cut waiting for prices to go back up. So far I've sold almost all of them minus a few bright rubies and a handful of orange gems. All in all I've been having some fun AH PvP with this market.

Last thing of note is that all LW goods, including arctic fur, have gone down to within 5-10g of the material cost so I'll only be making a very small amount on this market with profession bags. Hope you're doing better with it than I am in this market.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Trying to buy low and sell high is what your average person thinks of when they're told to work the AH for gold. This is obviously not true and will rarely get you anywhere as your sole source of income. However I have been doing this for the last couple days with some degree of success due to things changing with the patch. A lot of things are going up in value, others going down, but there is still a day to day desire fro these items so they will still sell for "normal" prices. One example is eternal fire.

These are used for a good number of things from cloth to titansteel which people are making every day, even some epic boe gear needs it which people still want. However with orbs buying the eternals in 3.3.3 their price will go down slightly. That means that people are selling what they have for a good price while they still can, making the price go down even further. Then once the prices bottom out a price spike comes since people still need them and they go back from 18g to 45g. Pay attention on your server and find what this is happening to and take advantage, you can easily triple your investment by having good timing with this.

Other things that are getting this effect are -saronite bars (and therefore titanium bars) due to the loss of titansteel cd-frostweave cloth, to make specialty cloth out of imbued-Eternal shadow and life-all enchanting mats (dust has spiked up to 60g/stack last night)-epic gems

So far the most consistent one is fires every 3 days and infinite dust every 4 days. Once that clock runs out the prices are either going way up or way down and I start to collect or stock up like mad. Give this a look on your server and see if you can pick up on any of these subtle happenings and make a few gold off of it.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Throughout my writing of this blog I've told you to do many different things to make gold. I've given tips and suggestions on things to do for a bit of extra coin or to just help you save some. However I haven't exactly you NOT to do something, so that's just what I'm going to do today.

It's easy to get into a collector's mentality while playing the AH. By that I mean you can get more into just having lots of stuff for the sake of having stuff. It can be fun after all to say that you have 50 stacks of abyss crystals, I have over 9000 inks or a bank tab full of saronite. Stop that! You are no longer making money, you are spending it for the fun of spending it and that's a massive waste. And waste is the biggest road block to making money next to not spending it.

The problem with this is not only will you be spending far more than you make, but it's even counter productive in and of itself. It becomes another time sink instead of something challenging or otherwise interesting. You will eventually spend more time looking at the inventory icons then you will be getting more. There will be loads of time spent on shuffling it around, making room, organizing, etc etc. Because of that you're shooting yourself in your own silly foot.

The things that you're collecting are not real. They cannot be eaten or drank, you can't have sex with them or otherwise enjoy the company of these pixels. And I highly doubt you can enjoy the artistic and creative merit of a Da Vinci or Picasso the same way as a digital inventory icon. So long as you have the intent of use, then collecting is perfectly fine. It will allow you to sell it and make more gold since it takes money to make money.

How can you turn this into money? First you can just not do it. Second is to take advantage of the people that do. If you're just not comfortable with "taking advantage of" then you just say it the way all the helpful friendly ppl do: you're offering a service, somebody has a want and you provide the means to fulfill that want... for a price. Things like this can be pets or basic materials, the hard part is identifying somebody that's collecting something for no use.

Collecting abyss crystals is a waste, and waste is a thief. Don't let it empty your pockets.

Friday, March 5, 2010

I've decided that I'm going to be hanging up the shield of my tank as of today and am 90% done with WoW. I'll be completely done and canceling my account once I reach the 1 million gold marker. The game just isn't fun for me anymore and why would you play a game that isn't fun? I won't bore you with my QQ about the game and why I think it's gone so far downhill, but I will say this. The biggest thing it has going for it (raiding) has turned from a challenge of team work and execution into just another grind for the social players to do.

I do however still enjoy to work the AH, but I can't do that forever of course. So I've decided instead of my goal being a third gold cap, I'll just go for the big time and hit a million. A little bit more than that and it would be 5 gold caps. What will I do with my gold once I get there? Who knows. I highly doubt I'll give it all away since I'm completely against that, but I know a few people that wouldn't completely waste the money so I just might. I won't be playing anymore so there's no point in buying anything or just letting it sit in a database. Regardless, I have a few very silly ideas in mind.

What about Cataclysm? Unless blizzard completely scraps what they've done with wrath and 90% of every raid, I won't be coming back. But in the mean time, most of my gaming will be spent playing Demon Souls, Mag, and Heavy Rain. Now that I won't be raiding or getting gems for my gear, my profits will slightly increase. And since I won't be playing as much, I can be far more aggressive in my AH game. So you can expect that sort of style of AHing in the time to come.

Also so that there's no confusion, this does not mean that the time I would normally be spending on raiding and my own fun will NOT be spent camping the AH. I have never done that nor will I ever. And in addition to that, the lack of in game expenses will not have a dramatic impact on my profits. I said slight and that's all it will be, maybe another 600 a week on average at the most.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Certain milestones tell you that you've reached a high point in your AH playing. These are important because they give you some extra inspiration to keep pressing on and to keep heading towards your goal. It's a reminder that you are always moving forward and you have reached a significant point. If you're working the AH only for the money, they won't have much meaning to you, but f you're doing it for the fun of it all like me, they matter quite a bit. It also serves as a reminder that even though you're not perfect and made some bad decisions and took a few losses here and there, you're still doing things right and heading the correct direction.

Some milestones to keep an eye out for are when you have 1,000 glyphs on auction. You have an entire bank tab filled with mats you need daily. Your first angry hate mail saying you don't know what you're doing. I get these a lot and even had people trash talking me in trade chat which made me laugh hard as I undercut them even more. Another milestone is of course having certain amounts of gold, be it the first time you broke 10k, 100, 214, etc. Or having the stock to post one of every weapon enchant out there is another good one.

These are important things to keep in mind at all times because it gives you a direction to go. Without direction, our goals can seem too far off to continue perusing them. Even when you know intellectually that you are still going on, without that small boost, or tiny reminder that you're doing well, you can lose faith sometimes. So long as you always keep the end in mind you can enjoy the present journey so much more which is what this is all about.

I have no need for gold, I don't need to buy gear, I have all I need for gems and enchants, but I still want more. Why? Because this is FUN for me. It's no different than collecting baseball cards, you want more because... MOAR! It's fun to see how much you have and it's reassuring to know that anything you might ever need to buy you can get without the slightest worry. And so I enjoy myself on my way to a million.

The other important factor of milestones in the AH game is they let you know when you've succeeded a certain amount that it's safer for you to branch out and to take bigger risks than before. If you end up taking a loss, it won't hurt as badly as before since you reached a certain point already. Once you become one of the 3 main sellers of glyphs and you lose a lot of money on enchanting, guess what? You're still solid in your 1k per day listing of glyphs. So you can use certain milestones as a sort of check point. It's scary getting into a new market for a while but once you can realize that "hey I have every valuable weapon enchant up and still selling" you can then start with all the armor enchants with confidence. And confidence is very important.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Today is an important post on the mentality of an AH player and a camper. Read it, think on it, read it again. Then ask yourself if you are a player or a camper.

Campers.I've noticed that I seem to have pissed off quite a few people as I am now being camped religiously. It doesn't matter what time I post, there is always at least one person watching their friends list like a hawk.Waiting... just waiting, for me to log so they can undercut me again. Am I upset? Am I annoyed? Not at all, in fact I can't help but laugh each time that it happens. I have had such an impact on these people and I have aggravated them to the point that they are spending the entire day it seems keeping an eye out for me. The best part is... I'm still making a ton of gold each and every day with less than half the time and effort of them.

So it's back to my old deep undercutting style: glyphs are now 8g each at all times and gems are soon to be only selling for a handful of gold over material cost. As soon as the enchanting scroll campers start spending more time waiting for me than they do playing the game I'll trash those prices too.

The thing to keep in mind that people who camp your auctions cannot grasp is that it has never been about the money. If I wasn't capped I still wouldn't care about how much I'm losing because of this. It's all about the fun of it, it's the entertainment I get from playing the AH and selling lots of different things.

Greed.I enjoy my 15 a month by finding good deals and seeing a lot of my auctions sell like any "business tycoon" type of game. They seem to enjoy spending their time by dropping what they happen to be doing when a name greys out and then reposting everything they own. Hey whatever makes you happy.

If the campers could understand that this is fun for the AH player, they would be able to hit the gold cap as well. The one thing that sets serious AH players apart from people that sit and spam cancel/post is that one is greedy and the other is entertained. AH players have fun and are happy weather they win or lose, the greedy are only happy when they sell everything and you sell nothing. And if you're the greedy type, you'll get very upset when you stop making thousand upon thousands a day from a single market. You'll stop taking risks because a few of them didn't work out and then cost yourself many chances to make far more.

You cannot get gold capped without taking these chances, this is a simple fact. I wouldn't be gold capped by now if I didn't take the chance on inscription, I wouldn't have my second one if I didn't take the HUGE risk of enchanting. I went into it because it was interesting, exciting, it was different! I had no clue how much money it could make, and I didn't care because it was so fun.

If all I cared about was money, I wouldn't have continued with the enchanting market which as you can tell from my business reports, is quite the money maker. I would've stopped because I wasn't making oodles of gold and lost a few grand in my first week. I might not have continued with glyphs once sales started slowing down. I wouldn't be pushing on with JC through gem shortages since it's not making me a truck load of cash. But I still do all those things and sometimes they don't make me a lot, but they're always fun. And fun is the only purpose, this is a game after all. People tend to forget that time to time.

When money is the only thing you're after, that is when you have a problem and need to take a serious look at yourself and what you're doing.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Another week has gone by and another truck has deposited its gold into my ever expanding coffers. It has truly been an interesting week as far as sales go. Though my profession numbers are still somewhat in line with previous weeks, the rates at which they have come in has been wildly different. As I mentioned before, it has become too much of a hassle to keep track of my spending so I'm just going to skip that part and only put in my total sales and current gold total. But before I get into all that, first here are the numbers.

Glyphs have been really picking up, so much so that I had to buy another bank tab worth of herbs to mill. Good thing that the prices are still extra low as usual (10g per stack). However campers are becoming a problem again as you'll read in tomorrow's post.

Enchanting has been exploding in sales to the point that it is literally impossible for me to have enough abyss crystals. I went through 3 full stacks in just a single night a few times. The same has been true for all the other enchanting mats that it's forcing me to keep up the saronite shuffle. I may consider starting to sell off the mats as is if the prices continue to go up.

Still selling vendor bought pets like hot cakes! I got rid of 3 sets of the ones bought in dalaran for 40g which sold for triple that. The ones I picked up in the netherstorm are hanging around the 20g area, still great profit for only flying out there once every two weeks.

I've had almost zero income from leather working due to material shortages.

Rare gems have been also slowing down due to 24 hour camping, so this market is about to plummet thanks to yours truly. The epic gems however are selling constantly as the demand is still there with emblem gear letting the M&S faceroll ICC more each reset. The interesting about the gem market this week is that every other day was a lack of sales then an explosion of selling out all of it. In fact, even last Tuesday I barely sold any which is unusual, but sold a ton on Monday and Saturday. Very interesting.

Tailoring is still very solid selling every single bag I craft the day it was made. Epic spellthreads are still going at a rate of 4-6 per day at 100% profit. The rare threads are actually worth making now due to the dropping price of eternals and spider silk. This is because of the orb -> eternal exchange coming up, but as for why silk is lowering I honestly don't know, but I'm stocking up on it as you can guess.

About Me

This blog is about discovering all of the ways to make money in Rift. There are no cheats, hacks, or exploits used in any of my methods.
After amassing a 2 million gold fortune in wow I decided to come over to Rift and see how well I can do there. It is my belief that the game does not matter as much as the methods used and mine have already been proven to work and work well.